With a 9-2 record, the Minnesota Vikings are one of the prime contenders in the NFC. They own the league’s best defense and boast an offense that creates enough big plays to put them over the top. They reached the NFC Championship game in two of the last three times they’ve had a 9-2 record or better after 11 games: 2009 (10-1) and 2017 (9-2).
The Vikings could reach the Super Bowl. However, they don’t feel like a contender because of what’s happening with the Detroit Lions. The Lions are enjoying the best season in the history of their 95-year franchise. At 11-1, they’re off to their best start ever and clown-hammering opponents.
The kids would say that the Lions are a wagon, lighting up the scoreboard and calling plays with their offensive linemen throwing the ball downfield. But the Vikings are busy gritting their team and eking it out against some of the NFL’s bottom feeders like the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans, and Chicago Bears.
This makes two fanbases feel different about their teams during their push to the playoffs. But do “style points” matter in the NFL? The answer is yes and no.
The Lions have the highest mark in the NFL, with an average scoring margin of 15 points per game. That margin is also the highest since the 2007 New England Patriots had a +17.5 scoring margin and went undefeated in the regular season before losing to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl.
That unhappy ending shouldn’t deter the Lions, though. From 2014 to 2018, the NFL’s leader in scoring margin has reached the Super Bowl. The 2014 Patriots (+10.9), the 2016 Patriots (+12.3), and the 2017 Philadelphia Eagles (+10.8) won the Super Bowl after leading the league in scoring margin, and the 2015 Carolina Panthers (+11.5) lost in the championship game.
Even the 2020 Tampa Bay Buccaneers took home the Lombardi Trophy after leading the league with a +9.1 scoring margin. But it hasn’t been as automatic as it was in the past.
Since 2018, teams leading the league in scoring margin have stumbled in the playoffs. The 2022 Eagles (+9.3) reached the Super Bowl. However, the 2018 Kansas City Chiefs (+8.7) and 2023 Baltimore Ravens (+11.6) lost in the conference championship. Then there’s the 2019 Ravens (+13.7) and 2021 Buffalo Bills (+11.5), who lost in the divisional round.
Teams with an average scoring margin of 10 or more points have a similar story dating back to 2012. From 2013 to 2019, all six teams with an average margin of victory of 10 points or greater have at least appeared in the Super Bowl. But the last four teams have suffered the same fate as the 2012 Denver Broncos and New England Patriots, falling short in an earlier round of the playoffs.
A more predictive way of finding a Super Bowl champion is to look at the top-five scoring margins. In the last 10 years, the Super Bowl winner has ranked in the top five in scoring margin eight times, including the 2023 (+7) and 2022 Chiefs (+7). While the 2021 Los Angeles Rams (sixth with a +5.7 scoring margin) and the 2015 Broncos (ninth with a +4.3 scoring margin) are outliers, they have a common denominator of smashing bad teams.
FTN’s Fantasy Aaron Schatz, who created the DVOA metric, highlighted that a winning team’s tendency to defeat opponents on their way to a championship could predict which team ultimately hoists the Lombardi Trophy at the end of the year.
“Historically, the best indicator of championships is the way they destroy the bad teams on their schedule,” Schaatz said on The Viking Age podcast. “It’s not winning close games against good teams. The best indicator of a championship team is that when they play a bad team, they destroy them.”
That’s where the outliers in scoring margin have made up ground. The 2021 Rams were outside the top five but had an average scoring margin of +16 against teams under .500. The 2015 Broncos also worked against sub-.500 teams but had a more modest margin of +6.1.
We can interpret this data in a few ways. The Lions look more like contenders because they’ve smashed bad teams with a 24.8-point scoring margin. The Vikings have a 6.25-point scoring margin against bad teams, but it also matters that they’ve won those games.
The biggest difference may be each team’s strength. The Vikings have the league’s best defense according to defense-adjusted value over average (DVOA). DVOA calculates a team’s success based on the down-and-distance of each play during the season, then calculates how much more or less successful each team is compared to the league average. But after Detroit’s win over the Chicago Bears on Thursday, the Lions are right behind Minnesota.
While the Lions have a great defense, they also have a great offense, ranking second behind the Ravens with a 19.1% offensive DVOA. The ability to score points is more sustainable than the ability to stop them; the Eagles savaged Minnesota’s top-ranked defense in the 2017 NFC Championship Game. Still, it doesn’t mean that all hope is lost.
The 2015 Broncos may be the best comparison to this year’s Vikings. Denver was rolling with the league’s top-ranked defense, with an aging Peyton Manning running the offense. Sam Darnold might be better than Manning was at the end of his career. However, consistency has been an issue for the Vikings, who suffered up-and-down performances during their four-game winning streak.
Even if both teams have pros and cons, they are both in the realm of Super Bowl contenders. While DVOA accounts for an entire season’s worth of work, it doesn’t break things down into a single game where the two teams have an equal chance of winning a game.
The Lions and Vikings slugged it out in a Week 7 meeting in Minneapolis. Two more meetings, a Week 18 meeting in Detroit and a potential playoff matchup in January, could follow.
It makes “style points” an interesting metric to watch because the race between Detroit and Minnesota could become one of the best in the league in the coming weeks.
